Nine years before the Senate campaign that made him one of the most influential and compelling voices in American politics, Barack Obama published this lyrical, unsentimental, and powerfully affecting memoir, which became a #1 New York Times bestseller when it was reissued in 2004. Dreams from My Father tells the story of Obama’s struggle to understand the forces that shaped him as the son of a black African father and white American mother—a struggle that takes him from the American heartland to the ancestral home of his great-aunt in the tiny African village of Alego.
Obama opens his story in New York, where he hears that his father—a figure he knows more as a myth than as a man—has died in a car accident. The news triggers a chain of memories as Barack retraces his family’s unusual history: the migration of his mother’s family from small-town Kansas to the Hawaiian islands; the love that develops between his mother and a promising young Kenyan student, a love nurtured by youthful innocence and the integrationist spirit of the early sixties; his father’s departure from Hawaii when Barack was two, as the realities of race and power reassert themselves; and Barack’s own awakening to the fears and doubts that exist not just between the larger black and white worlds but within himself.
Propelled by a desire to understand both the forces that shaped him and his father’s legacy, Barack moves to Chicago to work as a community organizer. There, against the backdrop of tumultuous political and racial conflict, he works to turn back the mounting despair of the inner city. His story becomes one with those of the people he works with as he learns about the value of community, the necessity of healing old wounds, and the possibility of faith in the midst of adversity

The Supreme Court’s 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade legalized abortion–but the debate was far from over, continuing to be a political battleground to this day. Bringing to light key voices that illuminate the case and its historical context, Before Roe v. Wade looks back and recaptures how the arguments for and against abortion took shape as claims about the meaning of the Constitution—and about how the nation could best honor its commitment to dignity, liberty, equality, and life.

In this ground-breaking book, Linda Greenhouse, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who covered the Supreme Court for 30 years for The New York Times, and Reva Siegel, a renowned professor at Yale Law School, collect documents illustrating cultural, political, and legal forces that helped shape the Supreme Court’s decision and the meanings it would come to have over time. A new afterword to the book explores what the history of conflict over abortion in the decade before Roe might reveal about the logic of conflict in the ensuing decades. The entanglement of the political parties in the abortion debate in the period before the Court ruled raises the possibility that Roe itself may not have engendered political polarization around abortion as is commonly supposed, but instead may have been engulfed by it.

Scientists are screaming from the rooftops that climate change isn’t just a bit of warming and some more storms. No exaggeration, our actual *survival* is at risk — this is a fight to save the world.

Our biosphere is in a fragile balance. Warm it a bit, and feedback loops start to kick in. Warming melts the arctic ice that reflects sunlight, which means more sunlight absorbed, which means more warming, which melts more ice etc. etc. These feedback loops have begun, and they’re approaching ‘tipping points’ where they spin out of our control, threatening everything we love.

The UN understands this, and they’ve called an emergency summit of world leaders in New York to discuss action, even inviting our movement into the meeting! The problem is, our heads of state are politicians, not scientists, and they respond to public pressure. They see the polls, but they ask, “where are the protests?” Sept. 21st is our answer.

With thousands of organisations from unions to faith groups, and hundreds of thousands of people already signed up, we’re about to launch the biggest climate change mobilisation in history, with marches from New York to Paris to Rio. On September 21st, we need to shake the world. To get there, we need to mobilise thousands of organisers, saturate subways and airwaves with ads, and mount an effective media operation.

If 50,000 of us contribute just a small amount in the next 5 days, we can make it happen. It’s time to save the world, let’s launch the movement that can do it.

Tell Twitter to disclose its diversity data and host a public forum on making Silicon Valley more inclusive.

Last year, when confronted with criticism about his appointment of an all-white, all-male Board of Directors, Dick Costolo – the CEO of Twitter – responded with a dismissive, joking tweet.

“The whole thing has to be about more than checking a box & saying ‘we did it!’,” he later typed.1

It’s been months now since Costolo’s defensive response and although Twitter later added a white woman to its Board,2 the company has yet to publicly address the failure to appoint a single Black person despite data that confirms that Black folks make up a disproportionate share of Twitter’s user-base.

Much worse, in recent weeks as other Silicon Valley tech companies like Facebook, Yahoo, Google, and LinkedIn took the historic first step to release depressing data about the racial and gender composition of their staffs, Twitter has remained silent — refusing to jump on the data-release-bandwagon.3

To date, most of the data disclosures have confirmed that Silicon Valley prefers its workers to be male and either white or Asian.4, 5 And although Twitter is unlikely to break any diversity trends that have emerged, transparency and a public commitment to improving the recruitment and retention of Black employees are critical first steps.

Though its minority representation numbers may mirror other Silicon Valley tech companies, Twitter has a unique role to play in this national conversation about hiring discrimination. Via the cultural force known as “Black Twitter,” Twitter has been built off the creativity of Black people, though they’re not on the payroll. 6, 7, 8 As such, the company owes our community more — more transparency, and a more thoughtful, solutions-oriented approach that addresses its failure to be more inclusive without blaming Black people.

Shifting the blame

Unfortunately, many of the tech companies (and their pundits) have been quick to incorrectly blame a leaky “talent pipeline” for the extreme racial hiring disparities revealed by these disclosures; pointing to statistics about the dearth of computer science degrees awarded to Black men and women, and bragging about their own philanthropic-investments in tech education for minorities. Silicon Valley apologists are working to divert blame.

Completely ignoring the fact that Black people are also severely underrepresented in nontechnical Silicon Valley roles, these blame-shifting tactics are not only misleading, they also serve to reinforce the false and problematic narrative that Black people are simply “unqualified,” undeserving and not valuable — that Black-thought is unqualified, underserving, and not valuable.

We cannot allow a corporate culture that seems hell-bent on making excuses for its replication of tired “good ol’ boy” networks to malign the intellectual and creative capacities of Black people in the process.

Thanks to the women in this room and people all across the country, we worked really hard — and it’s now been more than three years since Congress passed the Affordable Care Act and I signed it into law. It’s been nearly a year since the Supreme Court upheld the law under the Constitution. And, by the way, six months ago, the American people went to the polls and decided to keep going in this direction. So the law is here to stay.

I’ll do everything in my power to make sure nothing like this happens again by holding the responsible parties accountable, by putting in place new checks and new safeguards, and going forward, by making sure that the law is applied as it should be — in a fair and impartial way.

They exemplified the very idea of citizenship — that with our God-given rights come responsibilities and obligations to ourselves and to others. They embodied that idea. That’s the way they died. That’s how we must remember them. And that’s how we must live.